Review: Crooked River Burning

Winegardner, Mark. Crooked River Burning. New York: Harvest Books, 2001.

Crooked River Burning has been in my to-read pile since 2006, when I bought a copy of Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, for which Mark Winegardner penned the afterword, “Toward a Literature of the Midwest.”

(Though I didn’t know it at the time, the roots of Rust Belt Reader took hold right then and there.)

In his afterword, Winegardner grimly recounts the following experience with his publishers, prior to the publication of Crooked River Burning:

We went into a big conference room. The marketing director started the meeting by saying (after admitting she hadn’t read the novel), “We see this as a strong regional book.” If it does well in the Midwest, she says, there’s hope it might catch on elsewhere.

They all seemed surprised when I asked if the elevator went to the roof, so I could go jump off.

However, this was long before All Things Local became the boutique obsession of the intellectual class, before consumers craved “authenticity” (a dressed-up marketing term for “slumming it”), before Detroit’s ruined urban landscape became emblematic of a corporate greed gone not just wild but metastatic, before recession chic became de rigueur in the Real Simple parlors of the elite.

So, given the enthusiasm heaped on American Rust (not to mention a whopping $400,000 advance; in a city where you can buy a house for the price of a VCR, do you know how many foreclosures that could forestall?), I can’t help but wonder if Winegardner’s publisher might cast a slightly more generous eye on the book now than they did in 2001. If for no other reason than its sheer, ambitious scope: in 561 pages, Winegardner sets out to answer a question that many a visitor to the American Rust Belt has undoubtedly asked: what the heck happened here, and why?

The story begins in 1948, not long before the Indians win the World Series — a time when young white kids listen furtively to something not-quite-rock ‘n roll-yet on scratchy transistor radios, a time of summer romances and soda pop and idling in your Uncle Stan’s Jeepster till the moon peeps out. A time when Cleveland is the Sixth Biggest City in the Greatest Country in the World.

It ends at the moment in the summer of 1969 when the sludge-fouled Cuyahoga River erupts in flames, propelling an increasingly jumpy and jaded city into a seemingly irreversible death-spiral.

In other words, the story follows the exact narrative any Cleveland old-timer will launch into directly before he says, “Eh, Cleveland’s a ghost town. Last one out, turn off the lights!”

On one level, Crooked River Burning is a fairly standard rendering of the age-old poor boy yearns after rich, untouchable girl scenario. (In truth, though, in a post-World War II industrial city, that “poor boy” is happily middle class.) However, since Cleveland is so astoundingly, unalterably doomed, and since the relationship between west-sider David Zielinsky and Shaker Heights-bred Anne O’Connor is going to parallel Cleveland’s demise, the reader can’t help but stick around to see how this thing is gonna crash and burn. Even if it does seem cruelly voyeuristic.

The chief flaw of Crooked River Burning lies in its greatest strength: though gratifyingly epic as Lord of the Rings, it is as if, when setting out to write this book, Mark Winegardner was afraid that this might be the only Cleveland novel ever written. It is not that he attempts too much — he pulls most of it off, anyway — but that he attempts so much that you expect everything to be in there, and it isn’t. (Most notably, there’s little to no mention of the auto industry.)

Is Crooked River Burning too regional? Peppered almost to the point of overload with local notables — including Eliot Ness, Dorothy Fuldheim, the infamous Dr. Sam Sheppard, and Carl Stokes — at times Crooked River Burning does seem like too much of a ham-handed local history lesson to interest anyone outside Cleveland. It’s hard to imagine Winegardner’s lengthy, ripped-straight-from-the-autobiography “Local Heroes” interludes in a novel set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (We’d all be expected to know who he was talking about, or at least pretend to, lest we look like rubes. Then again, perhaps the publisher insisted on them.) At times, I felt myself almost disoriented by reading a novel about Cleveland, as if it had been set there by mistake. (Oops! This one was supposed to be about Red Hook, but the typesetter accidentally put in “Cleveland.” Send this one off to Big Lots, wouldya?) Instead of the distinct Cleveland accent, I realized I was reading the part of political boss Tom O’Connor in the voice of controlling old Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life, or union tough Mike Zielinsky in the voice of Tony Soprano.

But the setting is never in doubt. It’s that penchant for evocative place-setting that sets Winegardner apart. At times I found myself taking highly personalized roadtrips from the storyline: during the summer of 1952, when David and Anne first meet on Kelleys Island, my dad is 11 years old, collecting freshwater clams on the mainland at Port Clinton. Later, as David looks out over the Detroit-Superior bridge, I wonder about who’s living in (what will become) my house, just a few miles west.

Does Crooked River Burning accomplish what it sets out to do? Does it capture a crucial moment in Rust Belt history? Yes. Does it provide a decent explanation for why, in order to live in Cleveland, “You Gotta Be Tough?” Somewhat. Good enough for many people.

But in attempting to answer this monumental why, Winegardner also suggests that maybe, just maybe, the question itself is Cleveland’s problem. That this question is part and parcel of a deeply-ingrained civic neurosis, whose other chief features include the muttered apologies for never quite measuring up, the heartbreakingly childish search for that One Big Thing to take the blame (and on which to hang obviously doomed hopes, namely, counting on African-American Mayor Carl Stokes to singlehandedly resolve “the Negro problem”), the relentless moping (“it just figures that it would happen to Cleveland!” being the all-purpose answer to everything from the Hough Riots to Jim Brown’s sudden retirement from the NFL.)

There is a secret magic that librarians practice called readers’ advisory — that is, finding the right book for the right person at the right time. Readers’ advisory is a fickle and complex art that requires you to have a sharp understanding of the subtleties of human character. Why do people read what they like? Sometimes they can’t even tell you, so you have to consider other books that have moved them, that have done what they wanted a book to do (make them laugh? make them think? make them feel better about their own downtrodden situation because someone else is always worse off?) … and guess.

Who would I recommend Crooked River Burning to? Well, there is an offshoot of readers’ advisory called bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy recognizes that reading can be a healing art, that it can bring catharsis. A bibliotherapist might give a child whose parent has died a book about another child whose parent has died.

Crooked River Burning is a therapeutic book not just for the reader who feels frustrated by his once-thriving city’s decline, but for the reader who takes that decline personally. It is a book that, if a reader was younger and sillier, he might keep on his bedside table like a nightlight, just so he knows it’ll be there when he’s most vulnerable.

In the end, it’s not so much answers that help, but stories. This is the conclusion that Anne O’Connor reaches at the end of the novel, shortly before the Cuyahoga River bursts into flame. She has a sudden vision of her brother, Steven, shot down over the Sea of Japan: “when she’d tried to write a novel about this, thinking that the story was so tragic and inevitable it would tell itself, she realized no story told itself. Stories are unruly. All a story can hope to be is a great unraveling of accepted truth. The mystery is the fact.”